Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Martin Kelley at O’Reilly Broadcast – Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?: „With the rise of the real-time update streams being popularized by Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, users are becoming accustomed to a constantly-changing flow of pictures, videos and new snippets. Even actively-maintained websites seem locked in languid stupor in comparison. […] This will…

Scott Adams – How I Saved Newspapers: „The key is to get kids interested in the online version of the super-local news. Kids care about themselves more than they care about anything else in the world. […] With this concept the local newspaper extends their business model to include working with schools and youth sports…

Tim Bray – Al3x, Meet Ted: „At this point I appeal to Sturgeon’s Law, usually stated as “95% of everything is crap”. The key thing is, you have to do some mental filtering and look at the other 5%. The Internet helps via PageRank and friends, but independent thinking is required too: make your own…

InfoQ interview – Tim Bray on the Future of the Web: „When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web. […] Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: „We need something…

Jakob Nielsen – Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well: „Mega drop-downs make it easy to use icons and pictures when appropriate. And, even if you stick to text alone, you have richer typography at your disposal (letting you differentiate link sizes according to their importance, for example).“

Christopher Jones – PHP OCI8 Signal Handling and –enable-sigchild: „Only if you see defunct „zombie“ Oracle server processes then start PHP/Apache with the Oracle Net option BEQUEATH_DETACH=YES in your sqlnet.ora, or, to keep the setting specific to PHP, set your environment starting Apache. […] You should never need to configure PHP with –enable-sigchild or set…

Paul Graham – Cities and Ambition: „One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves…

Bill Taylor – Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit–And You Should Too: „The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: „If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.“ Zappos actually bribes…

Paul Graham – Lies We Tell Kids: „Whenever we lie to kids to protect them, we’re usually also lying to keep the peace. One consequence of this sort of calming lie is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. It’s hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something…

Clay Shirky – Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: „It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem. […] The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed…